Altered Book: Experimenting with Pull Tabs

May 13, 2010

I did a quick project yesterday to experiment with putting a pull tab mechanism, with object, into a book. I really like the results, though I’m not treating what I’ve made as a finished product. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, think back to those childhood pop-ups books where you come across a tab at the side of a page. Pulling the tab would make something move within the book. Usually the whole mechanism is made with paper, but because I want to eventually make altered books with movable parts I probably can’t only work with paper.

Pictured above is the finished project I made the other day. Below is the simple inner workings of the pull mechanism using cardstock and part of a resistor. The pattern I learned from uses a washer/lever system that comes through a hole in the background paper to attach to whatever should be moving on the front. This method is better suited to moving something back and forth, but I wanted to move the butterflies up and down. I decided to make slits in the background paper for the wires to run along when the tab was pulled.

The tricky part was figuring out how to position the wires correctly through the background paper to match up with the butterflies, and then slip the resistors through the paper once they were glued.

The finished movement isn’t dramatic (pictured below) but I’m satisfied with having figured out a new approach I can apply to something else.

Here’s the top view of the project so you can see that I actually did all of this inside a real book.